Posts Tagged ‘robots’

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Cast of Wonders 419: Little Wonders 26 – Fathers’ Day

Cast of Wonders 419: Little Wonders 26 – Fathers’ Day is a Cast of Wonders original.

Grief

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:19 — 20.9MB)

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The Last PoMatic
by Amanda Helms

Rain dripped down PoMatic!365’s chassis and occluded its camera. Running its tiny wiper over the lens, it continued the Standard Enticement Protocol.

“Step right up, folks! No visit to Blue Seas Boardwalk is complete without a customized poem from PoMatic! Love poems, haiku, sonnets, sestinas, free verse, all tailored to you, from a simple scan of your identichip! No two poems are ever the same!” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 410: Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town

Cast of Wonders 410: Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:40 — 24.9MB)

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Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town

by Shaenon Garrity

Thank you for uploading the autonomous guide stream Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town. Through this node we will provide scheduled reminders of your duty roster and update your personal ruleset as required. Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town may be deleted at the end of the summer when you depart.

1. Old Tech Town, known to indigenous humans as San Francisco, is a protected heritage site. Treat the area with the respect you would show your own root compiler, which in a sense (symbolic/holistic, not literal) it is. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 394: Staff Picks 2019 – Five Functions of Your Bionosaur

Originally published in Robot Dinosaur Fiction! (May 2018); Reprinted in Cast of Wonders, Dinovember, Episode 383, December 13, 2019.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:46 — 11.2MB)

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Five Functions of Your Bionosaur

by Rachael K. Jones

1.

Your parents first activate your bionosaur when they bring you home from the hospital. The bionosaur was a baby shower gift from your mom’s favorite aunt. They were nervous about its size, the stainless steel maw, the retractable razorclaws inside its stubby little arms, but the aunt had insisted. She’d programmed it herself, covered its titanium-alloy skeleton in top-grade synthskin featherscales, and pre-loaded it with educational apps.

(Continue Reading…)

Image of a robotic dinosaur

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Cast of Wonders 385: Be a Thunder, Release a Roar

Originally published in Robot Dinosaur Fiction! (May 2018)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:54 — 16.9MB)

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Be a Thunder, Release a Roar

by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

It’s January 2028 and young Uwaila watches the TV, fixated at what’s right in front of her. The dinosaurs appear with a mighty boom, with feet that hit the earth like a rumble. They make everything look so small, all humans look so little, make everybody afraid. They hold a certain kind of power Uwaila needs, a roar and gentleness that makes them perfect to watch. (Continue Reading…)

Image of a robotic dinosaur

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Cast of Wonders 384: Sphexa, Start Dinosaur

Originally published in Robot Dinosaur Fiction! (August 2018)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:45 — 13.1MB)

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Sphexa, Start Dinosaur

by Nibedita Sen

Asha—Ash to friends—wedges the maintenance door open wide enough to slip into the darkened interior of the abandoned ride. Inside smells like rust and stale water and plastic fused with metal.

“Sphexa,” he says. “Light.” (Continue Reading…)

Image of a robotic dinosaur

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Cast of Wonders 383: Five Functions of Your Bionosaur

Originally published in Robot Dinosaur Fiction! (May 2018)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:36 — 12.9MB)

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Five Functions of Your Bionosaur

by Rachael K. Jones

1.

Your parents first activate your bionosaur when they bring you home from the hospital. The bionosaur was a baby shower gift from your mom’s favorite aunt. They were nervous about its size, the stainless steel maw, the retractable razorclaws inside its stubby little arms, but the aunt had insisted. She’d programmed it herself, covered its titanium-alloy skeleton in top-grade synthskin featherscales, and pre-loaded it with educational apps. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 333: Tunguska, 1987

First published in Tales From Alternate Earths, Inklings Press, 2016

Content Warning: Profanity, death of a pet

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:41 — 39.5MB)

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Tunguska, 1987

by Maria Haskins

1929

Alexander was running through the snow. The rifle, and the pack of squirrel-skins pounded against his back with every step. Realization seeped into him as he ran: he had shot a Metallic. Its shiny armor hadn’t protected it. After all these years of living in fear, it had been that easy to take one down: one shot, straight into its mid-section, and the hovering thing had cracked apart and fallen to the ground. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 305: All Systems Go

Originally published in Spacesuits and Sixguns, Volume 2, Issue 1 (2015)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:40 — 18.6MB)

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All Systems Go

by Gerri Leen

The spaceport at Norn Five is a shining ode to order, automation, and interstellar travel. State-of-the-art communication ports dot the walls, offering instant access to loved ones, bosses, or eccentrics offering revolution at bargain prices.

Travelers move across the floors, various forms of locomotion taking them from point A to point B. Walkers tends to be the most common, but there are also floaters, crawlers, slitherers, and the odd vaporous beings that just sort of waft.

And working around it all are the units of the robotic char force. One in particular moves slowly along the wall, sucking up the residue left by one of the slithering public. It gets stuck for a moment when it hits a point where one being’s slime has mixed with another’s, making a sort of glue of the noxious kind. The bot revs forward, then backward, sucking up goop up as it goes, spritzing solvent onto the floor and then wiping it up so no one slips.

(Continue Reading…)

Episode 247: The Golem of Deneb Seven by Alex Shvartsman

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• Narrated by Rachel Swirsky
• Audio production by Jeremy Carter
• Originally published in InterGalactic Medicine Show Issue 40 (July 2014)
• Read along with the text of the story.
• Discuss this story on our forum
• For a list of all our stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia page
• Come visit us on Facebook and Twitter


Listen above or download here.

Show Notes

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, translator and game designer from Brooklyn, NY. Over 90 of his short stories have appeared in Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and many other magazines and anthologies. He won the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2015 and 2017 Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction (more about this later). He is the editor of the Unidentified Funny Objects annual anthology series of humorous SF/F. His collection, Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories and his steampunk humor novella H. G. Wells, Secret Agent were both published in 2015. Follow his work online or on Twitter.

 

 

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and she graduated from Clarion West in 2005. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy and Sturgeon Awards. She’s twice won the Nebula Award: for her 2010 novella, The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window and her 2014 short story If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love. You can read or listen to her free online fiction, or buy her collections, singles and anthologies. Find her on Twitter, and follow what she’s up to in her monthly newsletter. You can also support her on Patreon.

 

 

Theme music is “Appeal to Heavens” by Alexye Nov, available at MusicAlley.com.

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Cast of Wonders 128: Robots Don’t Cry by George Edwards

Cast of Wonders 128: Robots Don’t Cry by George Edwards is a Cast of Wonders original.

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Robots Don’t Cry

by George Edwards

I walked alone down a road with farms on all sides, cowboy hat on my head.

“Where am I Marco Polo?” I knew where I was, of course, but Marco Polo could see better.

He fed me all the data he could. He was one of the few satellites still orbiting earth after years of neglect.

“Thank you sir,” I said after his transmission ended. He gave me my exact location. I walked for hours.

A pick-up truck rambled up the road behind me, an odd noise for times like these. I stuck my thumb out.

The truck slowed and cracked its window. A grizzled old man was behind the wheel said, “Where ya headed?”

Using the friendliest voice in my bank I replied, “East, sir, to Auburn.”

He leaned over and opened his door for me. “Hop in,” he said.

(Continue Reading…)